The woman in red: Amy Bishop makes first court appearance

HUNTSVILLE, Ala. -- She wore a red short-sleeve jumpsuit. On the back were the words, in white and all capital letters,

MADISON COUNTY JAIL

She wore thin shackles on her wrists, which were revealed when she occasionally raised a hand to her face.

Eric SchultzAmy Bishop, accused UAH shooter, looks to the back of the courtroom during a preliminary hearing at the Madison County Courthouse Tuesday, March 23, 2010 in Huntsville, Ala. Bishop's attorney Roy Miller is seated next to her. Bishop, 45, is charged with killing three fellow University of Alabama in Huntsville biology faculty members and wounding three others during a shooting rampage at a faculty meeting on campus Feb. 12. Bishop faces three murder charges.

Her ankles were shackled as well, and the rubber clogs over thin white socks made a quick, faint "whisk-whisk-whisk" sound as she maneuvered from a holding room to her seat in room 251 on the second floor of the Madison County Courthouse Tuesday morning.

She wore a red and black plaid jacket on Feb. 12, the day she drove her red Cadillac to the UAH campus to teach a midmorning biology class.

The jacket was splattered with the red of her colleagues' blood when police found it wadded up in the trashcan of a women's restroom on the second floor of the Shelby Center, crammed there among a pile of paper towels.

There was a 9 mm Ruger in the same trashcan, seven live rounds still inside, the pistol's mechanism having jammed. Another magazine with 15 bullets was stuffed inside a black briefcase that still sat in a third-floor meeting room, where its tables and floors were turned red with the unfathomable terror that had just struck.

On Tuesday morning, Dr. Amy Bishop wore a blank, stoic face. Occasionally, she'd glance about the courtroom, at those who had come to see her as a curiosity or an object of news. She'd look at the prosecution team. Her demeanor revealed little.

She looked exactly like what has become the most famous mug shot in Huntsville history, the black bangs hanging over sad, vacant eyes, her mouth bowed with a weary droop at each corner.

This preliminary hearing was a formality before the obvious decision for Judge Ruth Ann Hall, that Bishop would be held without bond and the case bound over to a grand jury.

Only once during the 25-minute session was her attorney, Roy Miller, prompted to even reach out to her, with a hand to her upper arm as if to ask if she was OK.

That came after Charlie Gray, a homicide investigator with the Huntsville Police Department, testified that "all of (the witnesses) told pretty much the same story."

The story is that Bishop, who had previously been denied tenure for her position as a UAH professor, was in a meeting room with department colleagues when she pulled that 9mm Ruger from that black bag and began firing. Three were killed. Three were wounded, two of them critically. Were it not for the capriciousness of gun mechanics and the grace of God, more would likely have died.

The case "is not a whodunit." That's a line from both sides of the courthouse. Even Miller has acknowledged in interviews - before Judge Hall predictably clamped a gag order on the principals in the case - Bishop did the shooting.

Bishop spent more than two hours in an initial interview with investigators after the shooting. Gray recalled that several times she pleaded, "I wasn't there" or "That wasn't me."

That will be the defense's theme when the case goes to trial.

Amy Bishop did the shooting. Was she truly all there?

And who is she?

Cold-blooded evil incarnate? Or a woman with severe mental problems?

That, ultimately, will be the profound decision a jury must make about the woman in red.